Gentoo Linux Localization Guide

1. Time zone

In order to keep time properly, you need to select your timezone so that your system knows where it is located. Look for your timezone in /usr/share/zoneinfo. You then set your timezone in /etc/conf.d/clock. Please avoid the /usr/share/zoneinfo/Etc/GMT* timezones as their names do not indicate the expected zones. For instance, GMT-8 is in fact GMT+8.

Code Listing 1.1: Setting the timezone information

# ls /usr/share/zoneinfo
(Suppose you want to use Brussels)
# nano -w /etc/conf.d/clock
TIMEZONE="Europe/Brussels"

# date
Wed Mar  8 00:46:05 CET 2006

Note: Make sure that the timezone indicator (in this case "CET") is correct for your area.

Note: You can set the value of TZ to be everything after the /usr/share/zoneinfo in your shell rc file (.bash_profile for bash) for a user-level setting. In this case TZ="Europe/Berlin".

2. Hardware Clock

In most Gentoo Linux installations, your hardware clock is set to UTC (or GMT, Greenwich Mean Time) and then your timezone is taken into account to determine the actual, local time. If, for some reason, you need your hardware clock not to be in UTC, you will need to edit /etc/conf.d/clock and change the value of CLOCK from UTC to local.

Code Listing 2.1: local vs. GMT clock

(recommended:)
CLOCK="UTC"
(or:)
CLOCK="local"

3. Locale system

What are locales?

A Locale is a set of information that most programs use for determining country and language specific settings. The locales and their data are part of the system library and can be found at /usr/share/locale on most systems. A locale name is generally named ab_CD where ab is your two (or three) letter language code (as specified in ISO-639) and CD is your two letter country code (as specified in ISO-3166). Variants are often appended to locale names, e.g. en_GB.utf8 or de_DE@euro. Please explore Wikipedia to read more about locales and related articles.

Environment variables for locales

Locale settings are stored in environment variables. These are typically set in the /etc/env.d/02locale (for system-wide settings) and ~/.bashrc (for user-specific settings) file. The variables controlling different aspects of locale settings are given in the table below, those with highest precedence (i.e. those that override settings below them) are at the top of the table. All variables take one name of a locale in ab_CD format given above.

Variable name	Explanation
LC_ALL	Define all locale settings at once. This is the top level setting for locales which will override any other setting.
LC_COLLATE	Define alphabetical ordering of strings. This affects e.g. output of sorted directory listing.
LC_CTYPE	Define the character handling properties for the system. This determines which characters are seen as part of alphabet, numeric and so on. This also determines the character set used, if applicable.
LC_MESSAGES	Programs' localizations for applications that use message based localization scheme (majority of Gnu programs, see next chapters for closer information which do, and how to get the programs, that don't, to work).
LC_MONETARY	Defines currency units and formatting of currency type numeric values.
LC_NUMERIC	Defines formatting of numeric values which aren't monetary. Affects things such as thousand separator and decimal separator.
LC_TIME	Defines formatting of dates and times.
LC_PAPER	Defines default paper size.
LANG	Defines all locale settings at once. This setting can be overridden by individual LC_* settings above or even by LC_ALL.

Note: Even though most programs work with LC_ALL only, some of them misbehave if LC_ALL is set but LANG isn't. If you want to play safe, set them both.

Most typically users only set the LANG variable and perhaps LC_CTYPE variable on user level by adding definitions to shells startup files defining the environment variable manually from command line:

Code Listing 3.1: Setting the user locale in ~/.bashrc

export LANG="de_DE@euro"

Note: Append @euro to your locale if you want to use the Euro currency symbol (€)

It is also possible to set a system-wide locale for all users and programs:

Code Listing 3.2: Setting the default system locale in /etc/env.d/02locale

LC_ALL="de_DE@euro"
LANG="de_DE@euro"

A common practice is to use only per user locale settings and leave the default system locale unset. In this case system locale defaults to a special value "C", which for historical reasons maps to the English locale.

For message based localization to work in programs that support it, you will probably need to have programs compiled with the nls (Native language support) USE flag set. Most of the programs using nls also need the gettext library to extract and use localized messages. Of course, Portage will automatically install it when needed.

Once you have set the right locale, be sure to update your environment variables to make your system aware of the change:

Code Listing 3.3: Update the environment

(For system-wide default locale:)
# env-update && source /etc/profile

(For user-specific locale:)
$ source ~/.bashrc

After this, you will need to kill your X server by pressing Ctrl-Alt-Backspace, log out, then log in as user.

Now, verify that the changes have taken effect:

Code Listing 3.4: Verify env changes

$ env | grep -i LC_

There is also additional localisation variable called LINGUAS, which affects to localisation files that get installed in gettext-based programs, and decides used localisation for some specific software packages, such as kde-base/kde-i18n and app-office/openoffice. The variable takes in space-separated list of language codes, and suggested place to set it is /etc/make.conf:

Code Listing 3.5: Setting LINGUAS in make.conf

# nano -w /etc/make.conf
(Add in the LINGUAS variable. For instance, 
for German, Finnish and English:)
LINGUAS="de fi en"

Generating Specific Locales

If you use a locale that isn't available by default, you should use localedef to generate your locale. For instance:

Code Listing 3.6: Generating a locale using localedef

# localedef -c -i en_US -f ISO-8859-15 en_US.ISO-8859-15

After having generated the locale, you can export the LANG variable as you see fit.

Code Listing 3.7: Exporting the LANG variable

# export LANG="en_US.ISO-8859-15"

Be sure to update the environment after the change:

Code Listing 3.8: Update the environment

# env-update && source /etc/profile

After this, you will need to kill your X server by pressing Ctrl-Alt-Backspace, log out, then log in as user.

Generating locales for glibc

You will probably only use one or maybe two locales on your system. You can specify locales you will need in /etc/locale.gen.

Code Listing 3.9: Adding locales to /etc/locale.gen

en_GB ISO-8859-1
en_GB.UTF-8 UTF-8
de_DE ISO-8859-1
de_DE@euro ISO-8859-15

The next step is to run locale-gen. It will generate all the locales you have specified in the /etc/locale.gen file.

Note: locale-gen is available in glibc-2.3.6-r4 and newer. If you have an older version of glibc, you should update it now.

You can verify that your selected locales are available by running locale -a.

4. Keyboard layout for the console

The keyboard layout used by the console is set in /etc/conf.d/keymaps by the KEYMAP variable. Valid values can be found in /usr/share/keymaps/{arch}/. i386 has further subdivisions into layout (qwerty/, azerty/, etc.). Some languages have multiple options, so you may wish to experiment to decide which one fits your needs best.

Code Listing 4.1: Setting the console keymap

KEYMAP="de"
KEYMAP="de-latin1"
KEYMAP="de-latin1-nodeadkeys"

5. Keyboard layout for the X server

The keyboard layout to be used by the X server is specified in /etc/X11/xorg.conf by the XkbLayout option.

Code Listing 5.1: Setting the X keymap

 Section "InputDevice"
     Identifier  "Keyboard1"
     ...
     Option "XkbLayout"    "de"
     #Option "XkbModel"     "pc105"    ## this is for international keyboards.
     # Option "XkbVariant"  "nodeadkeys" ## this would be used for xterm input
     ...

If you have an international keyboard layout, you should set the option XkbModel to pc102 or pc105, as this will allow mapping of the additional keys specific to your keyboard.

Deadkeys allow you to press keys that will not show immediately but will be combined with another letter to produce a single character such as é,è,á,à, etc. Setting XkbVariant to nodeadkeys allows input these special characters into X terminals.

If you would like to switch between more than one keyboard layout (for example English and Russian), all you have to do is add a few lines to xorg.conf that specify the desired layouts and the shortcut command.

Code Listing 5.2: Switching between two keyboard layouts

 Section "InputDevice"
     Identifier  "Keyboard1"
     ...
     Option "XkbLayout"    "us,ru"
     Option "XkbOptions"   "grp:alt_shift_toggle,grp_led:scroll"

Here, XkbOptions allows you to toggle between keyboard layouts by simply pressing Alt-Shift. This will also toggle the Scroll Lock light on or off, thanks to the grp_led:scroll option. This is a handy visual indicator of which keyboard layout you are using at the moment.

6. KDE

For KDE you have to install the kde-base/kde-i18n package. Kde-i18n respects LINGUAS variable described earlier.

7. The Euro Symbol for the Console

In order to get your console to display the Euro symbol, you will need to set CONSOLEFONT in /etc/conf.d/consolefont to a file found in /usr/share/consolefonts/ (without the .psfu.gz). lat9w-16 has the Euro symbol.

Code Listing 7.1: Setting the console font

CONSOLEFONT="lat9w-16"

You should verify that CONSOLEFONT is in the boot runlevel:

Code Listing 7.2: Verify the proper runlevel

# rc-update -v show | grep -i consolefont

If no runlevel is displayed for CONSOLEFONT, then add it to the proper level:

Code Listing 7.3: Add consolefont to boot

# rc-update add consolefont boot

8. The Euro Symbol in X

Most Applications

Getting the Euro symbol to work properly in X is a little bit tougher. The first thing you should do is change the fixed and variable definitions in /usr/share/fonts/misc/fonts.alias to end in iso8859-15 instead of iso8859-1.

Code Listing 8.1: Setting default X fonts

fixed        -misc-fixed-medium-r-semicondensed--13-120-75-75-c-60-iso8859-15
variable     -*-helvetica-bold-r-normal-*-*-120-*-*-*-*-iso8859-15

Some applications use their own font, and you will have to tell them separately to use a font with the Euro symbol. You can do this at a user-specific level in .Xdefaults (you can copy this file to /etc/skel/ for use by new users), or at a global level for any application with a resource file in /usr/share/X11/app-defaults/ (like xterm). In these files you generally have to change an existing line, rather than adding a new one. To change our xterm font, for instance:

Code Listing 8.2: Setting fonts for xterm

(in your home directory)
$ echo 'XTerm*font: fixed' >> .Xresources 
$ xrdb -merge .Xresources

The Euro symbol in (X)Emacs

To use the Euro symbol in (X)Emacs, add the following to .Xdefaults:

Code Listing 8.3: setting the font for emacs

Emacs.default.attributeFont: -*-courier-medium-r-*-*-*-120-*-*-*-*-iso8859-15

For XEmacs (not plain Emacs), you have to do a little more. In /home/user/.xemacs/init.el, add:

Code Listing 8.4: setting the font for xemacs

(define-key global-map '(EuroSign) '[€])

Note: The symbol in the []s is the Euro symbol.

OpenOffice.Org

The current stable app-office/openoffice and app-office/openoffice-bin ebuilds support the LINGUAS variable for selecting installed GUI language packs. To see the status of GUI translation, hyphenation, spell checking and other localisations on your language, please refer to OpenOffice.Org localisation web site.

Updated October 4, 2007

Summary: This guide should help users localize their Gentoo Linux distribution to any European locale. It uses Germany as a case-study, since it is translated from the German doc. Includes configuration for use of the euro currency symbol.

Alexander Holler
Author

Steven Lucy
Translator/Editor

Benny Chuang
Editor

Lars Weiler
Editor

Tobias Scherbaum
Editor

Flammie Pirinen
Editor

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